9/22/2010 @ 6:00AM

Getting To A Cloud In Every Hand

Today the two biggest trends in the technology industry–the cloud and mobility–are converging. The platform they are combining to create will infuse more intelligence into the world around us and lower the barriers to entry into the global economy. More people will have more access to more information than ever before.

People in the industry have been talking about a future where everything is delivered as a service via the cloud–from computing resources to business processes to personal interactions–for the past few years. With modern mobile operating systems and the ability to deliver computing resources at an unprecedented scale, all of the pieces are in place to bring that vision to life.

The mobile/cloud platform represents the next major phase in computing, and for the IT industry, the next stage of growth. A recent report by Merrill Lynch projects that the mobile Internet will be 10 times the size of the desktop Internet, connecting more than 10 billion “units,” from smartphones to wireless home appliances. To capitalize on this shift, the industry is working to bring both the economics and the experience of the cloud to everyone, from the world’s largest organizations to individuals in the developing world.

For chief information officers, this means allowing them to purchase vast computing resources on demand with unprecedented simplicity, like the swipe of a credit card. Today, many large enterprises only trust public clouds to run their least critical applications, but this is only the beginning. In research labs across the world, technologists are hard at work solving the issues of security and reliability that will make public clouds more relevant to more customers. In the near future, public clouds will handle an increasing amount of the IT that is fundamental to running large organizations.

Regardless of technical innovation, in some cases, a private cloud will be the most efficient, secure way to manage some workloads. Advances in scale-out infrastructure, virtualization and software-as-a-service are transforming enterprise data centers into flexible pools of computing resources. Companies that deploy hybrid IT environments, utilizing both public and private clouds, can have the best of both worlds.

For consumers, our experience with technology will no longer be fragmented across devices. At the moment, the piece of data we need at any given moment is often just outside of our reach. The combination of the cloud and Web-aware mobile operating systems will bring together people, conversations, content and events. Operating systems that span across devices will help get the right information to the right place at the right time. We’ll be able to access streams of information and robust services through whatever screen we’re looking at, whether smartphone, laptop, slate, or Web-connected printer.

In the developing world, the mobile/cloud platform will further level the playing field of economic opportunity. For example, of the 1 billion people in India, only 80 million are online, but more than 600 million use cellphones. As those phones become more sophisticated, connected and are backed by the cloud, that disparity will be wiped away.

Finally, as developer communities continue to create consumer services and apps, scale-out IT infrastructure will form an efficient foundation that ensures pervasive access and global reach. Companies that can connect the dots, from infrastructure to mobile device, and take an open standards approach will be able to offer developers the most efficient means to reach the broadest audience possible.

At HP, we believe that information is the most valuable resource in the 21st century. As the industry drives economies of scale into the next phase of computing, we will see an order of magnitude gain in efficiency in the enterprise, and more and more people participating in the information economy.